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Guardian Angel Motorsports raffling off spaceflight

January 23, 2012

On a clear day, you can see Daytona. Photo by NASA

Aside from the Sunshine State's permanent association with Ferrari-bodied Chevrolet Corvettes and Edward James Olmos's portrayal of Lt. Martin Castillo, Florida's known for two things near and dear to our hearts--a vibrant history of sports-car endurance racing and the terrific glory of large-scale rocketry. As such, Guardian Angel Motorsports, the team that races for charity, has put together the raffle prize to end all raffle prizes in association with its showing at the Grand-Am 200 and the Rolex 24 at Daytona this weekend: a suborbital spaceflight.

The team convinced Space Adventures Ltd, to donate the trip. The company previously sent seven passengers to the International Space Station aboard Soyuz capsules. Those orbital vacations, however, are reserved for the extraordinarily flush, with seats alongside Russia's finest cosmonauts running in the neighborhood of $20 million.

To take a bit of the financial yikes out of higher-than-the-sky tourism, Space Adventures is ginning up a more affordable program to compete with the likes of Virgin Galactic. Just as Virgin's working with Scaled Composites to build its suborbital spacecraft, Space Adventures has partnered with Armadillo Aerospace, a spacecraft company founded by John Carmack.

Carmack amassed his considerable pile of dosh developing games such as Doom and Quake. Before he returned to his boyhood love of rocketry, he'd been spending money on very fast cars, which is how he wound up involved in Bob Norwood's Doom Porsche project, an endeavor that resulted in a trio of obscenely-quick sports racers, the first of which was stolen and never seen again.

The flights will reach 100 kilometers over the Earth, above the Kármán line, not to be confused with the Karmann line, which is where they built the Chrysler Crossfire and assembled AMC Javelins for European consumption. Were your hundred-dollar raffle ticket not to land you a spot on the rocket, what would you have to shell out for such an experience? A cool $110,000. Which, we might add, is a sight less expensive than the half-mil it cost to build the first Doom Porsche back in the mid-1990s. Also, 62 miles high? Take that, Roger McGuinn!